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THEOLOGY, STRATEGY, TACTICS We remember that our Church has been twice rent asunder by issues which have been recognized shortly afterward as unnecessary. We dread the possibility of having such a painful experience repeated in our own time. We are persuaded that the great body of the Church, laymen and ministers, have little sympathy with the extremes of dogmatic conflict, and are already weary of the strife of tongues, and are longing for peace and united work.
A Plea for Peace and Work (1893)(1)
It is to be noted that the charges against these appellants do not in any wise involve questions of faith or doctrine.
Digest . . . of the General Assembly (1938)(2)
Briggs was de-frocked officially for heresy in 1893. Machen was de-frocked officially for non-heresy in 1936. In each case, sanctions were applied in terms of a theology. The conservatives' theology was a theology of ultimate sanctions: heaven and hell. The liberals' theology was a theology of temporal sanctions: the flow of funds. The liberals constructed and then executed a comprehensive strategy based on their theology. It was a strategy of subversion. It is time to evaluate the liberals' strategy: what it was and why it worked.
Offense and Defense Every successful strategy has both an offensive and defensive aspect, but one aspect will be emphasized more than the other in any given historical situation. Neither the Old School nor the New School had an offensive strategy after the reunion of 1869. They had defense only, and not much of that after 1900.
In 1869, the Old School had a substantial numerical majority over the New School in membership, ministers, and churches. This did them no good. The Old School adopted a primarily defensive strategy after the Swing case in 1874. Its leaders chose to concentrate on only one aspect of the conflict: formal theology. They wrote theological essays and a few books that were critical of modernism. This, they hoped (and no doubt prayed), would keep the Presbyterian Church from drifting into liberalism. The Old School had no visible offensive strategy of its own. It was limited institutionally to whatever the New School was willing to support, which after the McCune trial in 1878 was not very much. The Church rarely brought formal covenant lawsuits against modernists. To become successful, the Old School had to devise a comprehensive offensive strategy. It never did.(3) They lacked a secondary institutional strategy after 1900 other than writing articles and holding public meetings (1922-1925). They were attacked by the modernists' allies outside the gates and were undermined by modernists within. They lost. Step by step, they surrendered the Presbyterian Church to its enemies until such time as a last-ditch defensive effort could only result in the defeat of the defenders.
The New School also employed a primarily defensive strategy. This strategy had six stages. (1) From 1869 to 1878: go along with the Old School's numerical majority by pursuing two pastors, David Swing and William McCune. But McCune's problem was his repudiation of denominationalism and infant baptism, not liberalism as such. He was an evangelical ecumenist, not a modernist.(4) (2) From 1879 to 1890: keep the Old School from interfering with both evangelism and the peace of the Church; refuse to bring heresy accusations against modernists. (3) From 1891 to 1900: keep the modernists from becoming so rhetorically forthright in their rejection of conservative evangelicalism that the New School's effective control over the Church's machinery would become an embarrassment. (4) From 1901 to 1921: maintain the peace of the Church. (5) From 1922 to 1925: assert control through the General Assembly. (6) From 1926 to 1933: defer the major confrontation that Machen was demanding. (7) From 1934 to 1936: consent to the imposition of Church sanctions, but in the name of peace--a defensive reaction. This meant isolating Old School members and their fundamentalist and traditionalist evangelical allies. In June of 1936, the New School quietly surrendered.
The liberals had a comprehensive strategy: subversion. This strategy was both offensive and defensive.
Capturing the Robes American liberals adopted a culture-wide offensive strategy after 1865, a long-term strategy of institutional infiltration and capture. Three institutions were the primary targets of this strategy: the college, the judiciary, and the Church. I have called this strategy capturing the robes.(5) These three institutions have long possessed enormous influence in American life. All three are marked publicly by the wearing of black robes on formal occasions. Robes were the medieval world's mark of judicial sovereignty. The liberals' strategy has worked exceptionally well. They have captured the nation.(6)
In the institutional struggle for the control of the churches, liberal humanists became known as modernists. What was the nature of the liberals' ecclesiastical strategy? It was primarily offensive. It was also conspiratorial. What do I mean by "conspiracy"? The word comes from two Greek words meaning "breathe together." A conspiracy is an organized effort to steal a rival movement's institutions through a strategy of misrepresentation, infiltration, and money--preferably money supplied by those people whose authority is being undermined.
There are two parts to a successful offensive conspiratorial strategy: external and internal. First, there is a frontal assault intellectually and financially from outside the targeted organization or organizations. This assault challenges the legitimacy of the presuppositions and actions of the targeted organization. Second, there is simultaneously a systematic, coordinated program of subversion from within. Subversives who hold the views and goals of the institution's enemies "outside the walls" enter the targeted organization as if they were in agreement with the ideals of the intended victims. They have a hidden agenda. Their agenda is to conquer from within. They seek to gain positions of authority within the targeted organization. They spend decades to gain access to these positions. Theirs is a long-range strategy.(7) Those people who are committed to a long-term plan have a great advantage over enemies with a short-range mentality.
How did this offensive strategy apply to the Northern Presbyterian Church? A good example comes from the 1940's, a few years after the end of the struggle surveyed by this book. Nathaniel Weyl, in later years a conservative author and scholar, describes an offer he received while still in college.
. . . when I was the leader of the radical movement on the Columbia University campus, I was invited to become an honorary member of the Atheists' Club at adjacent Union Theological Seminary. I asked rather naively how an honorable man could accept an appointment to the ministry if he didn't believe in God. The reply was that the pulpit provided a captive audience, a position of authority and a regular salary--all most useful to socialist and Communist propagandists. I declined the invitation.(8)
What we need to understand is this: the modernists' primary strategy was theological, not organizational. This is what has not been recognized by the standard histories of the Presbyterian conflict. The historians have accepted the modernists' word that they were not concerned with theology, only with "mission." The historians have not recognized that modernism is a theology disguised as a program or mere methodology. The modernists employed this disguise to advance their theology. In their dedicated commitment to a uniquely covenantal theology, they mirrored the Old School: the five points of modernism.
The modernists systematically imported alien theological ideas into the Church, but they disguised these ideas. They defended this alien theology by means of two arguments: (1) the supposed consistency of modernism with the underlying ethical meaning of the doctrines of the Church, though of course not with the specific terminology of the Confession and catechisms; (2) an appeal to the (autonomous) scientific spirit of the age. The first claim was a lie because the second claim was true. They used the language of orthodoxy in order to destroy the substance of orthodoxy.
Their secondary strategy was organizational: infiltrating the seminaries, boards, and bureaucracies of the Church. They were wolves in sheep's clothing who came to replace the shepherds and steal both the sheep and the sheepfold. The shepherds on duty before 1922 did not clearly identify the secondary aspect of the modernists' offensive strategy, and so they did not take effective steps to defeat it.
The modernists also had a defensive strategy: to avoid excommunication. They appealed to the institutionally dominant New School members in terms of a plea for peace, for the open investigation of the Bible, for toleration, for evangelism, and for unity. They also resorted to an appeal to academic freedom for the Church's seminaries. This defensive strategy was what the public saw. It concealed the quiet, offensive strategy of bureaucratic infiltration except in the case of a few controversial appointments to seminary positions, which became public matters.
The Modernists' Five Steps to Victory Presbyterian modernists were committed to a theological strategy: to overturn the judicial authority of the Bible by means of an appeal, first, to the categories of biblical higher criticism and, second, to a specific form of biblical theology based on higher criticism. This approach asserted that (1) the historical claims of the Bible's existing texts regarding dates and authorship cannot be supported by the internal textual evidence of the dates and authorship, and (2) historical evidence contemporary (supposedly) to the texts also throws doubts on the texts' dating.
The presupposition of the modernist approach to the Bible is that the Bible is subject to the same form of literary and textual criticism that every other text is. In fact, modern literary criticism was originally derived from the techniques of higher criticism. The modernists were understandably alert to the limits of history. Their alertness was an outgrowth of their worldview: the substitution of historical process for God's absolute decree. They understood that the subversion of the denomination would take a long time.
The Five Steps: Strategy and Tactics
The modernists had a five-point covenant theology.(9) The structure of this theology established the requirements of their institutional strategy. It is crucial to recognize that modernism was a theology more than an institutional program. Modernism's theology drove its strategy, not vice-versa.
First, there had to be a substitution of a new doctrine of God in the name of Calvinist orthodoxy. This could be done through emphasizing some aspects of the Bible's doctrine of God and neglecting others. But what had to be eliminated from liberal Christianity was the doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty. The undermining of this doctrine was accomplished by numerous appeals to the New School's tradition of experientialism and experientialism's dual emphasis: evangelism and cooperation. Calvinism's God was re-defined by the modernists as the God of merciful inclusion rather than the God of covenantal exclusion, the God of grace rather than the God of wrath. The premier mark of such exclusiveness is the presence of negative sanctions: in eternity and history. As a tactic, the modernists could appeal to the traditionally loose interpretations and language of the New School as a means of undermining the authority of the Old School's view. Tactically, they could operate under the umbrella of operational Arminianism, invoking the memory of New School men such as Albert Barnes, in order to shield themselves from censure from the formal Calvinism of the Old School. They could wait patiently to come out from under this umbrella until they felt confident that they had the votes to shield Kant's noumenal god from Calvin's.
Second, there had to be a challenge to the judicial authority of the Bible: higher criticism. Undermining the judicial authority of the Old Testament had begun very early: a seventeenth-century reaction against Puritanism.(10) This worldview was being extended in the nineteenth century through German higher criticism. The modernists' primary long-run tactic was to encourage young scholars to go to German universities for graduate study, and then return to teach in the seminaries. One member per faculty was sufficient; the seminary's entire faculty would then be forced to defend the legitimacy of higher criticism as an academic method in order to justify the presence of that single higher critic on the faculty.
A subordinate tactic was to create a jointly published journal, The Presbyterian Review, sanctioned by the denomination, which would act as a conduit for higher criticism. This journal would not initially have to endorse higher criticism. It would only have to provide a forum for debate, with higher criticism therefore acting as an equal participant theologically. The approach would be to focus the debate on the question of methodology rather than theology, i.e., the question of the more productive way to "mine the resource" of God's word. For this approach to work, the journal would necessitate getting Old School defenders of inerrancy to participate, although this would be necessary only at the beginning. This was an appropriate tactic to use against the Old School: publishing in scholarly journals was an Old School tradition. Once the major representatives of the Old School had accepted the legitimacy of the public debate, it would prove nearly impossible for them to shut it off. They would already have "baptized" the methodology as academically and theologically legitimate. How could they make a court case out of this methodology, given their prior participation? As a byproduct, the journal might recruit new men.(11)
Third, there had to be a challenge to the judicial legitimacy of the denomination's confessional standards. The tactic here was simple: force a public embarrassment or at least acknowledgment that the denomination no longer was willing to enforce certain points in the Confession and the catechisms. Even better, prove that the best representatives in the Old School had publicly deviated from the standards without having been called to account, and without their ever having called for a formal revision of the standards. It would then be possible to extrapolate from these precedents: "If the Old School can abandon certain points without fear of sanctions, why not the New School?" Modernists could continue to hide under the New School's umbrella.
Fourth, there had to be a challenge to the legitimacy of the Church's courts. It would not be sufficient to show that the courts had not previously been willing to defend the Confession's standards on some points. It was necessary to show that the courts should not impose sanctions at all regarding "technical or methodological" disputes. This tactic could be successful only after a sufficient number of modernist graduates of seminaries had been ordained and were sitting on Presbyterian courts. The courts would then refuse to convict. To make this stand, the General Assembly had to be undermined as the denomination's supreme court: too many ruling elders voted at the General Assembly, and they did not share the New York Presbytery's views on ordination.
Fifth, the Confessionalists would have to be cut off from the institutional inheritance. This took place definitively in 1936, and continued, congregation by congregation, until 1967, when the Westminster Confession was formally revised. This strategy required some means of protecting against an exodus of pastors and donors. The modernists adopted two major tactics. First, they gained control over the national pension fund in 1927: any pastor leaving the denomination would lose his pension. The other major tactic was keeping ownership of Church property: seceders would lose the property.
Strategy and Tactics: Details The modernists adopted a strategy that was consistent with their worldview. They adopted tactics that were both consistent with their strategy and applicable to changing conditions. They were able to employ this strategy from within the Northern Presbyterian Church because of the institutional and theological opening made available to them by the Presbyterian union of 1869, after which the Confessional rigor of the Old School could no longer be enforced by all of the presbyteries. It is my suggestion that variants of this modernist strategy were employed successfully in every denomination in the United States until the 1970's, when the Missouri Synod Lutherans slowed it down dramatically, and in the 1980's, when the Southern Baptist Convention reversed it.
The fundamental strategy of the modernists has been to destroy the legitimacy of conservative, traditional denominations. This is a theological strategy. Legitimacy is central; it is point one of the five-point organizational model: legitimacy, authority, legality, sanctions, and inheritance. Without legitimacy, no organization can long survive. Since American Protestant churches have long denied the legitimacy of invoking political power to defend theology, the modernists had only to undermine their rivals' confidence in the their own standards. These standards were both theological and institutional.
Modernists targeted the intellectual leadership of the churches with an attack on traditional theology. They targeted laymen differently: not with an explicitly theological appeal, but rather practical. They appealed to the benefits of Church growth through institutional peace. This appeal was also seemingly ethical: an appeal to their opponents' sense of fair play. Simultaneously, from outside the ecclesiastical camp, modernists and humanists delivered a relentless intellectual attack on the fundamental confession of the conservatives: faith in the Bible as the infallible word of God. From inside the camp, the modernists always adopted the role of wounded lambs: the institutionally abused. Only when they had taken control of a denomination's judicial hierarchy did they adopt a new role: wounded water buffalos.
The attack began with theology and later extended to Church courts: standards and sanctions. We must understand their strategy and their tactics. To do this, we must first understand the broad outlines of their theology.
Theology
There is no permanent plan of God that provides coherence to the universe.
There is no inerrant and permanent verbal revelation of God to man.
There must therefore be a reliable word of man in order to provide coherence in the universe.
This word is evolving: "dynamic," "progressive," "process-oriented," "dialectical," and therefore relative over time.
Creeds are men's verbal representations of a symbolic (zero fixed content) representation of God, rather than men's verbal approximations of God's permanent word.
The essence of the Church's ministry is concern for mankind rather than the defense of the integrity of God's word.
The unity of God must be reflected in the unity of man.
The unity of man must be reflected in the unity of man's institutions.
Any institutional disunity must be smoothed over dialectically, until such time as the forces of unity can purge out the non-pluralistic elements.
Strategy: Outside the Camp
Undermine the sense of legitimacy among a targeted denomination's leaders.
Use the higher criticism of the Bible as a means of challenging the legitimacy of conservative denominations: "defenders of childish myths."
Use the latest findings of humanist scholarship, especially Darwinism, to attack the opposing Church as out of touch with reality.
Establish standards of academic certification that conform to those taught in institutions controlled by secular humanists or theological modernists.
Produce a continuing barrage of propaganda from the "neutral" secular media exposing the targeted group as foolish, old-fashioned, and unfair. (The classic example of this strategy is what the press, national and international, did to William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial in 1925.)
Strategy: Inside the Camp
The strategic goal is the attainment of institutional control of the targeted Church's educational and judicial institutions.
Target seminaries first: you indoctrinate(12) the next generation of ministers, plus your enemies pay your salary. Also, an educational institution is inherently co-operative: financing and recruiting force a broader base of supporters, meaning less theologically rigorous donors.
Target denominational colleges (same reasons).
Emphasize certification by Establishment humanist institutions of higher learning as the preferred (later, required) criteria for service in denominational institutions of higher learning.
Emphasize educational credentials for the highest Church positions. (A liberal and ecumenical bias dominates formal education generally, as does the doctrine of academic freedom, which can be transferred to other institutions.)
Infiltrate the centralized agencies within the Church: your enemies will then pay your salary.
Recruit bright or popular young people.
Recruit wealthy or powerful laymen through offers of prestige positions or the promise of future influence.
Infiltrate the Church's publishing outlets.
Create new publishing outlets within the Church.
Avoid institutional confrontations initially.
Co-operate with other denominations or ecclesiastical groups. Ecumenists inside all groups can then support each other.
Rely on other people's money at every stage, if possible.
Tactics
Adopt the Bible's language to advance the cause of the unification of man.
Resist calls for creedal discipline. Invoke toleration ("pluralism").
Emphasize the benefits of practical religion: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, etc.
Place shared concern for mankind on a par (and then above) "divisive" concern for creeds or doctrines.
Repeat pleas for peace whenever the creedalists begin to organize their forces.
Implement all procedural protections against charges of heresy. Issue warnings concerning the high costs of such a fight, including institutional sanctions to be imposed on people who bring unprovable accusations.
Conduct all battles against enemies in terms of institutional criteria, not creeds: toleration, peace, and (in the final stages) obedience to hierarchical authority.
Master the Church's bureaucratic machinery. Quietly place your allies in these permanent bureaucratic positions.
Academic Freedom: Escaping Negative Sanctions In every institution, the ultimate earthly authority over operations is possessed by those who finance these operations. Even in covenantal institutions, he who pays the piper calls the tune. If the tunes do not please the payers, they can stop paying. Yet every institution is staffed by pipers who prefer to call their own tunes while being supported by the listeners. The pipers prefer the payers to sit quietly and listen to the pipers' officially sanctioned tunes. (Applause is optional.) If there is one universal law of bureaucracy, this is it. Those who pay pipers need to be perpetually on guard against every institutional roadblock against their authority to call the tune.
In the history of the West, the most successful of all such roadblocks has been the ideology known as academic freedom. It has been successful because the pipers of academia have persuaded everyone that they are in fact priests: in principle beyond any negative sanctions except those imposed by their own members. The primary key to extending their control has been the substitution of academic certification for apprenticeship as the means of entry into the professions: first and foremost, the Church's bureaucratic hierarchies; secondarily, the State's. This has been true since the late eleventh century.(13) The secondary key has been the re-definition of occupations as professions: State-regulated occupations. The self-anointed priests of academia thereby gain control over access to employment by Church and State.
The Church established this pattern by uncritically accepting the claims of the academic pipers: first with the college and then with the theological seminary (1808 onward). The Church transferred the initial sanctioning process from ordained Church officers to the academic pipers. Marsden points out that in the United States in the 1870's, "the revolutionary trend toward universities, elective courses, separation of disciplines, and academic freedom (on the premise that there might be more than one variety of truth) was just beginning."(14) With the exception of the ideal of academic freedom, these trends did not even begin to touch Princeton Seminary until 1906, the year that over a thousand Cumberland Presbyterian congregations began entering the PCUSA, and also the year that both Machen and Charles Erdman joined the faculty. But academic freedom of the faculty from the General Assembly had been entrenched at Princeton since 1870. Any newly appointed professor who avoided a veto by the General Assembly at the next GA meeting could not again be challenged by a GA in that particular academic office.
A Most Successful Lie
The ideology of academic freedom rests on a lie: the idea that the professor's pursuit of truth is sovereign, irrespective of the intent of those who finance this pursuit. This lie is undergirded by another lie: that truth exists independently of the hierarchical authority associated with biblical covenantalism. That is to say, there is supposedly some self-existing, religiously neutral, universal system or methodology of truth that exists apart from the self-revelation of God in the Bible. Academic freedom rests, in short, on the myth of religious neutrality.
Schlossberg has identified the two supposed sources of this independently existing truth: history and nature. He calls them idols of history and idols of nature.(15) There is only one alternative to these twin idols: the absolute authority of the Bible. Most conservatives refuse to accept this alternative. This is why the conservative critic of higher education, Russell Kirk, could not escape the academic rot he so deplored.(16) He wrote: "For no proverb is truer than this: `The man who pays the piper calls the tune.'"(17) But he did not apply this principle to higher education. He did not identify the family as the lawful primary tune-caller in education, with the Church as a secondary agent, and the State as a completely illegitimate interloper. He recognized that "If you take the king's shilling, you must fight the king's battles."(18) But he did not call for the total abolition of taxpayer-funded education. He also accepted the definition of academic freedom provided by the humanist editor of Collier's Encyclopedia, W. T. Couch:
"Academic freedom," says a distinguished editor, W. T. Couch, "is the principle designed to protect the teacher from hazards that tend to prevent him from meeting his obligations in the pursuit of truth." This is the best definition of the idea that I have come upon.(19)
On the contrary, academic freedom is the ideology of self-anointed would-be academic priests: a technique employed to escape the lawful authority of Church, State, and family--the God-ordained covenantal institutions that support educators financially and culturally. "The pursuit of truth" is the verbal smoke screen they use to camouflage their real intentions: to gain the authority to define truth as a pursuit--an evolutionary or dialectical process, mainly academic--and thereby gain priestly status. The marks of their priestly status are the black academic robe and the Ph.D. degree.
Non-Covenanted Screening Agents
Who has primary authority over education: Church, State, or family? The economic answer is simple: in order to maximize income, whoever provides the funding is sovereign economically. Whoever is sovereign judicially must meet the demand of those who pay the bills.(20) Higher education has always rejected both of these principles of sovereignty. Faculty members insist on controlling the system, no matter who is legally in charge, and no matter what the bill-payers desire.(21) This was also true of nineteenth-century theological seminaries: the first graduate schools in America.
The problem with a seminary is that it trains candidates for the preaching ministry. A seminary screens access to ordination. It can be outside the ecclesiastical chain of command, yet its authority to accept men as students and to graduate only some of them makes it functionally part of the system. In Presbyterianism, the seminary becomes the most important part, for its professors possess great though informal authority, and its graduates inherit denominational authority over time.
No Presbyterian seminary was ever under extensive ecclesiastical authority, not even Princeton, which was the most subordinate of all the seminaries. The reunion of 1869 did lead to the establishment of veto power over new faculty appointments by the General Assembly. The denomination had only until the next General Assembly meeting to veto any professorial appointment. After that meeting ended, the professor was safe for the remainder of his academic career, even if subsequently de-frocked. By continuing to extend the positive sanction of institutional acceptability to Union Seminary after its secession in 1892, the denomination transferred its inheritance to the mortal enemies of both Calvinism and the Westminster Confession. This transfer was completed in 1936.
The presbyteries continued to demand judicial sovereignty over ordination, but they were not functionally sovereign, since the Presbyterian tradition of an educated ministry mandated seminary education for candidates except in special circumstances. The presbyteries successfully resisted control by the General Assembly, yet in doing so, they transferred the authority to impose preliminary sanctions--academic sanctions--to theologically and judicially independent seminaries. This was inherently an affirmation of academic autonomy.
To some extent, every nineteenth-century Presbyterian seminary faculty hid behind the medieval robe of academic freedom--autonomy from Church interference--yet seminaries existed only because they were the delegated screening agents for the presbyteries. In order to defend its covenantal standards, the Presbyterian Church would have had to abandon all traces of the self-serving professorial ideology known as academic freedom. The presbyteries would have had to monitor the doctrines taught in every Presbyterian college and seminary classroom, with the General Assemblies ready to try cases of theological deviance by any faculty member. Except in the 1890's, the Church was unwilling to do this.
Note: those who have written the book-length histories of the Presbyterian conflict, as well as the history of just about everything else, are the salaried beneficiaries of the academic screening system, and rarely even think to criticize it. It deserves criticism.(22) This system has delivered money, prestige, and enormous power into their hands. The universally accepted ideology of academic freedom and its visible sign, the academic robe, have led to the triumph of self-certified humanism in every accredited academic institution of higher learning in the West. This should alert churches to the covenantal threat posed by academic freedom and academic robes, but it rarely does.
The Soft Underbelly(23)
Beginning with the founding of Andover Seminary in 1808, the theological seminary became the soft underbelly of conservative American Christianity. After 1875, a tiny handful of dedicated and highly educated modernists began to exploit this weakness. Briggs was their front man after Baptist C. H. Toy retreated under fire. Briggs lost the battle, but his associates won the war. He remained at Union Seminary to instruct the next generation of Presbyterian ministers. So did his de-frocked colleague, Henry Preserved Smith. So did his "quit just before being de-frocked" colleague Arthur C. McGiffert, who later became Union's president.
Nothing was done by the denomination's officers to strengthen the defenses of the Presbyterian seminary system. In 1936, Machen learned just how easily the seminaries could have been defended after 1870. By this time, he was in charge of his own seminary, Westminster Seminary, an institution legally as independent as Union Seminary had been before 1870 and after 1891, but with this crucial difference: the doors to the Presbyterian Church's pastorates were effectively closed to Westminster's graduates after 1936. The Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., removed its positive sanctions from Westminster Seminary. The majority Calvinists could have done the same thing after 1869. The modernists in 1936 understood ecclesiastical sanctions, having spent over six decades evading them and then overcoming them. The Calvinists of the Northern Presbyterian Church never did understand how to employ negative sanctions. As a result, they fought for what was a lost cause after 1869.
Strategies must be adjusted in order to work in different organizational environments. The liberals have been successful in every system of ecclesiology. The Congregationalists fell first, in the mid-nineteenth century; then came the Episcopalians and the Disciples of Christ in the late nineteenth; the Methodists in the early twentieth; the Northern Baptists, and the Northern Presbyterians by the mid-1930's; and all but the Missouri Synod Lutherans (so far) and Wisconsin Synod Lutherans since then. Even the Jesuits fell in the mid-1960's. Only the Southern Baptists have reversed the process, and it took a systematic plan to do it.
To understand why the Presbyterian liberals' strategy was successful, we must first recognize the four types of Protestant Church government. I argue that Presbyterianism is uniquely vulnerable to the strategy of subversion, for its system of government corresponds closest to the modern liberal's preferred form of government: bureaucracy.
Three Views of Church Government There are four basic systems of Church government: prelacy, episcopacy, independency, and Presbyterianism. Traditional Presbyterian theologians have generally combined prelacy and episcopacy, dismissing prelacy and not mentioning episcopacy,(24) but this is analytically incorrect. The fundamental practical question of authority in any system of government is this: "To whom do I report?" This is the question of lawful hierarchy. I begin my discussion of the four systems with this question: To whom does an ordained officer report?
Prelacy is marked by a hierarchical government in which bishops serve: (1) as regional pastors to local pastors; (2) as superior pastors to subordinate pastors in ecclesiastical orders whose institutional boundaries are occupational rather than geographical, i.e., religious orders. A supreme bishop can more easily settle the turf disputes that prelacy generates with its system of ecclesiastical orders. For example, an offense-oriented international order such as the Jesuits would be institutionally impossible to maintain outside of prelacy. Without its own bishop to protect it from any bishop other than the Pope, the power of a cross-boundary ecclesiastical order would be eroded by objections from bishops whose territories had been invaded.
Episcopacy also has bishops. The bishop serves as a regional pastor to local pastors. He helps the pastor to settle disputes within the local congregation. He provides advice regarding what should be done to extend the work of the local church. He exercises a veto, but one subject to formal appeal.
Both prelacy and episcopacy at the upper levels provide some degree of initiatory authority, although far less so in episcopacy than in prelacy, because of the differing nature of authority structures over the bishops.
To whom do the bishops report? The decisions of episcopal bishops are judged by a synod composed of other bishops and laymen who represent local congregations. The system is based on personal authority held in check by corporate authority; this corporate authority is not limited to bishops. Representatives of local churches share judicial authority in the highest council. Final sovereignty is not lodged in any person or any ecclesiastical order.
In prelacy, bishops are judged only by other bishops. Prelacy requires a supreme bishop, or at least one who is "first among equals." Because official authority is personal, prelacy is far more capable of initiating projects from the top than other forms of hierarchical Church order are.
Independency is marked by a senior local officer, the pastor, who is a member of the congregation and who has no higher individual or association above him beyond the local congregation. He is technically "first among equals" in the local government, but his visibility and audibility place him in a unique position. The pastor who cannot exert informal control over his officers will eventually quit or be fired.
Each of these three systems is bureaucratic, for each has ultimate authority lodged in a corporation, but all three have strong elements of personalism, since an individual is responsible for initial decision-making, subject to a corporate or personal (i.e., papal) veto.
The Presbyterian System Presbyterianism, in contrast, is far more impersonal organizationally. Its personalism is judicially local. On the local level, the pastor or teaching elder is "first among equals," for he belongs to his presbytery, not to the local congregation. He is ordained by other teaching elders, and he alone has the right to ordain other ministers. "Ruling elders are not to take part in the ordination of ministers."(25) (The physical act of laying on hands in ordination is optional; prayer is deemed sufficient.)(26) In this sense, the minister is judicially separate from ruling elders, who are elected by the local congregation, not the presbytery. Nevertheless, the system asserts the equality of elders: "Whether in Session, Presbytery, Synod, or General Assembly, all elders are on an equality."(27) Paraphrasing George Orwell, all Presbyterian elders are equal, but some are more equal than others.
The local congregation cannot impose judicial sanctions on the pastor, except the sanction of dismissal, which is extreme and rarely resorted to. This sanction is more economic than judicial. All decision-making above the congregational level is corporate rather than individual: committees of pastors and lay (ruling) elders. No individual speaks for a presbytery, synod, or General Assembly with the same degree of judicial and personal authority that a pastor speaks for a local congregation. Committees and permanent Church boards possess most of whatever power exists in American Presbyterianism to initiate projects outside of local congregations. American Presbyterianism has no doctrine of personal representation above the local congregation.(28)
Yet personal representation is an inescapable concept. In any organization, there must be a "first among equals." God makes some men responsible for others. There are always few leaders and lots of followers. Too many cooks will spoil the ecclesiastical soup as predictably as any other kind of soup. Leaders possess greater authority and greater responsibility. Leadership at the national level will generally fall into the hands of one or two spokesmen for each of three identifiable institutions: seminaries, the larger churches, and one or two of the permanent national boards. We can classify the three major groupings as intellectual leaders, pastoral leaders, and bureaucratic leaders. Occasionally, a nationally known figure without institutional ties may appear, the obvious example being William Jennings Bryan in the first half of the 1920's, but this is rare.(29)
The intellectuals voice the technical details of rival theological viewpoints. The large-church pastors voice the practical applications of the rival theological viewpoints. The bureaucratic leaders implement the practical applications of the rival theological viewpoints. The intellectuals battle in print, so the records of their battles survive. In the 1880's, Charles A. Briggs battled Princetonians A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield. In the early 1920's, Machen had no rival Presbyterian theologian to match him; he battled the whole theological world of liberal American Protestantism, and he did so virtually by himself. The major pastoral representatives were the two most famous American pastor-preachers of their day: Clarence E. Macartney, who initially sided with Machen, against Harry Emerson Fosdick. Both of them wrote.
The key figure was a layman and a bureaucrat: Robert E. Speer, the head of the Foreign Missions Board. While Speer was a prolific author,(30) he is not remembered for his writing, which is understandable: his writing is remarkably unmemorable. His writing style reflected his bureaucratic commitment; there is nothing unique about anything he wrote. He is remembered because he wielded great institutional authority, and because his side won.
The Centralization of Power
What the history of Northern Presbyterianism reveals is that the Old School's representatives, mainly theologians, were progressively impotent to change Church affairs in the 1880-1900 era, and at the mercy of the informal decisions of the bureaucrats after 1906. As power was steadily centralized in the national boards after 1900, and especially after the restructuring of the Church's government in 1908, the impetus favored those aspects of Church life that are pleasing to bureaucrats: numerical growth, institutional stability, personal cooperation, and public peace. Why was power centralized nationally? Because the pastors of large congregations have very similar institutional goals for their own churches that bureaucrats have for the denomination. Only those rare large-church pastors who prefer theology to growth will side with Calvinism's theology of exclusivism.(31) Leading pastors tended to side with the Church's bureaucrats, deferring the details of administration to them and thereby transferring great authority to them. Large-church pastors represented the other pastors, who acquiesced to this transfer.
There is a basic rule in life: power flows to those who will take full responsibility. In an officially bureaucratic system, this will inevitably be bureaucratic leaders. But there is an inherent problem with bureaucracy: very few bureaucrats want to take full responsibility. So, power flows to those few bureaucrats who make deals, manipulate others, and do it behind closed doors. The heart of a bureaucracy is its secrecy.(32)
This creates a problem for historians, who are supposed to confine themselves to written records. They tend to pay attention to what articulate representatives have written, not what consummate bureaucrats have done behind the scenes. When participants destroy copies of their correspondence, as J. Ross Stevenson did, it makes the historian's work that much more difficult. This is equally true for contemporaries. They do not see what is really going on organizationally.
Appeals Court vs. Central Planning
Presbyterian government, as with all forms of government, is hierarchical. What is unique about Presbyterianism is that its higher assemblies were originally designed to function primarily as appeals courts. Nineteenth-century Presbyterianism was a bottom-up system of government, not top-down. Its system of appeals courts reflected the heart of original Presbyterian government. This was the conclusion of Rev. Thomas Witherow of Belfast in his 1856 defense of Presbyterianism, The Apostolic Church: Which Is It? "In the Apostolic Church there was recognized the privilege of appeal and the right of government. This privilege is not only admitted, but it is one of the most distinguishing principles of Presbyterianism."(33) He referred Wardlow's defense of ecclesiastical independency:
"Independency," says Dr. Wardlow, "is the competency of every distinct Church to manage, without appeal, its own affairs." This is an ingenious mode of disguising the most repulsive feature of the system. Very few would deny that a Church is competent to manage its own affairs in such a way as to obviate the necessity of appeal; but what we assert is, that, when the Church lacks the necessary wisdom and discretion to do so, appeal among Independents is not permitted, the injured is deprived of redress, and power, for which the possessor is irresponsible to man, degenerates into tyranny when it is unwisely exercised, and there is nothing to keep it in check."(34)
Presbyterian General Assemblies and synods were never designed to be initiating agencies. Presbyterianism has always implicitly recognized that non-profit, bureaucratic agencies find it difficult for central managers to initiate and then oversee the details of large projects. Sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in 1908: "The higher official often lacks the knowledge of technical details or of the actual objective situation. The lower official usually moves in the same circle of tasks during all his life, and thus gains a specialized knowledge of his narrow field that a person who rapidly advances through the various stages does not possess. Yet, the decisions of such persons cannot be executed without that knowledge of detail."(35) Central managers must limit themselves to announcing the organization's general goals, establishing the criteria of successful performance, and imposing appropriate sanctions: rewards and punishments. They cannot carry out their grand designs without generating voluntary and active support at the lower levels of the organization. Central management cannot tell its subordinates exactly what needs to be done in particular cases. The old example is correct: if you assign two men to swat a fly, one to give the orders and the other to swat the fly, the fly will die of old age. There is always something lost--information and motivation--between central management and lower management.
The Limits on Knowledge
No institution's chain of command is perfect. The institution's sanctions, both positive and negative, which are necessary for establishing and maintaining control by the top, never quite fit the ends desired at the top. Exhaustive knowledge of specific details is required at the top for complete control. But exhaustive knowledge is an illegitimate goal for a creature. The knowledge possessed by those at the bottom is diverse, specialized, and constantly fluctuating. This information cannot be transmitted to the top without adding confusion and removing precision. There is "noise" generated by the channels of communication. The primary task of the founders of an organization is to design an institution in which (1) the organization does not subsequently deviate from its foundational goal; (2) the really important information that keeps the organization both faithful and flexible is not lost in the noise; (3) the value of the organization's output is maximized, using ordinary inputs, both human and inanimate; (4) motivation focuses on whatever is most important for both survival and fidelity to the original goals; (5) the organization remains flexible enough to respond to new conditions. This is extremely difficult to do. The old slogan about the British Navy is on target: "An organization designed by geniuses to be run by morons."
A free-market profit management system achieves these ends by means of the profit-and-loss statement. Senior managers have this vital numerical and quantitative tool of evaluation. A non-profit bureaucracy, unlike profit-seeking management, does not operate in terms of a competitive market. It does not have a profit-and-loss statement.(36) Therefore, bureaucracies cannot operate for very long as anything more than agencies with the veto. They are not entrepreneurial, i.e., seeking out new areas of service and new sources of funds. They are traditional: trying to keep the institutional ship afloat, moving slowly along a familiar route. Initiative has to remain at the local level. Members of any senior bureaucracy who forget this must then face the grim reality of the observation made by Lamennais, the early nineteenth-century French conservative social theorist: "Centralization induces apoplexy at the center and anemia at the extremities."(37) This institutional reality is what brought down the Soviet Union in 1991.
Presbyterian government in its original form reflected this. Primary initiative was left at the level of the local congregation. While the denomination's central government declared its Confession and heard judicial appeals and expressed general goals, Presbyterian General Assemblies were not effective initiating agencies. Those who ran the modern bureaucracy in between General Assemblies became very effective initiators, but at the price of ecclesiastical liberty.
The Confession as Constitutional Law
If liberty is to be maintained, how can a Presbyterian denomination resist the centrifugal pressures of independency? How can the organizational unity of the wider Church be conformed to the diverse needs and skills of local congregations? How can the congregation or pastor be policed without destroying local initiative? The answer is simple: by means of the Confession and catechisms of the Presbyterian Church. These documents provide objective standards by which candidates for the eldership--both ruling elders and teaching elders (ministers)(38)--are screened and subsequently monitored. This second phase is crucial, as the Confessionalists learned too late in the Presbyterian conflict. These documents serve as standards by which the decisions of local congregations can be evaluated by an appeals court.
What was the original theory behind Presbyterian government? First and foremost, it rested on the public confession that the Bible provides permanent fundamental law to judge the content of the creeds. Chapter I of the Westminster Confession of Faith is "Of the Holy Scripture." It is the longest chapter in the Confession. Section 1 says that God has revealed Himself in history through His written word: "Therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal Himself, and to declare His will unto His Church; . . . to commit the same wholly unto writing: . . ." The Bible is the Church's fundamental law. Section 8 says of the two testaments, "being immediately inspired by God, and, by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as, in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal to them."
Second, the Westminster Confession and, in theory if rarely in practice, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, provide the Presbyterian Church with constitutional law: its articles of incorporation. Third, the Form of Government provides the by-laws of this constitution.(39) Fourth, subsequent court decisions, including the highest court, the General Assembly, serve as legal precedents.(40) All of these features must be assumed to be judicially coherent with each other, or else no level of Presbyterian Church government possesses legitimacy. Any successful attack on an existing establishment within a Presbyterian denomination has to begin with an attack on some aspect of this integrated judicial structure. The existing establishment must be made to appear illegitimate because of its violation of the coherence of this structure.
A successful attack cannot rest here. The modernist attack in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., eventually carried out a full-scale alteration of the entire structure, culminating in 1967 with the alteration of the Westminster Confession. But this attack did not begin with a frontal assault on the Bible or the Church's Confession. It had begun nine decades earlier with a process of chipping away at both the Bible and the Confession, which created doubts long before it launched its successful attack in the 1920's.
The modernists had a strategy. First, the Bible must be challenged, though not all of it, and not all at once. Doubt comes in bits and pieces, and this is sufficient if your opponents have defended a "total package" view of the Bible's infallibility and integrity.
Next, doubts must be raised regarding some details of the Confession. Calling into question the objective authority of the Westminster Confession is inherently an attack on the Presbyterian system of government. Without the judicial authority of the Confession, one of two things must take place: (1) local congregations become independent of the denomination's central government; (2) the central government becomes tyrannical and theologically arbitrary by invoking a different standard. The Confession therefore serves as the keystone in the Presbyterian system of checks and balances. The problem is, there has been no agreement regarding what is actually affirmed through subscription--stricter vs. looser subscription--nor about the proper locus of enforcement of the Confession's provisions.
Confession: Subscription and Revision Confessions are human artifacts. No confession can be elevated to equality with the Bible in an orthodox Church. To do so would divinize the creed or confession. Creeds are imperfect. Creeds must be supplemented by confessions as times and concerns change. A creed that is never changed and never supplemented is abandoned to the realm of the past; it becomes a museum piece or an icon that is invoked for tradition's sake. The progress of confessions in history is a mark of theological progress. So, the question arises: How to preserve the authority of a confession, if wholesale changes threaten it or no changes whatsoever also threaten it? Here is the dilemma: if the confessions are never revised because of men's fear of reducing the confessions' authority, the confessions will eventually lose authority, for they will become out of date.
Only the Bible possesses timeless authority, according to the Westminster Confession. So, if Presbyterian courts neglect to enforce the Confession and the two catechisms because they are perceived to be out of date, then the documents will eventually lose their authority. A confession that does not speak to fundamental theological issues of the day becomes irrelevant. Without revisions, the omissions and errors of the past become permanent.
Institutionally, a denomination that requires 100 percent subscription to a confession has either committed suicide or will abandon the confession unofficially. All confessions are imperfect. Thus, to require complete subscription is to prevent official confessional revision. The revisions will come anyway, i.e., the confession will be abandoned, but not openly. If no one inside the denomination is allowed to disagree, how can there ever be discussions regarding a needed revision? This is the paradox of confessionalism.
The Presbyterian Church recognized the existence of this paradox. In 1729, the New England group--the "low Church" wing--made it clear that there had to be a resolution to the problem. The Adopting Act of 1729 was the result. All candidates for the eldership had to subscribe to the Westminster Confession and catechisms in general, but then publicly admit any doubts before ordination. The ordaining presbytery would then take up the matter.(41) Both the discussion of the issue and the resulting screening process were to be public. If a presbytery ordained the man, he became a "point of entry" for the new idea. If the synod or General Assembly let this ordination stand, it was admitting that the new idea was, in the words of the Adopting Act, in accord with the "essential and necessary articles, good forms of sound words and systems of Christian doctrine. . . ."(42) The presbytery had the initial authority to test new ideas through the ordination procedure. If not overruled, this decision stood. The presbytery "baptized" the new idea into the covenant theology of the Confession.
Revising the Confession
How to preserve judicial authority through constitutional amendment and by the revision of legal precedents: here is a major dilemma of Constitutional government, both civil and ecclesiastical. The dilemma is more obvious with respect to Presbyterian government than with any other form of Church government. A Presbyterian system must take active institutional steps to insure that its courts exercise the veto, or else it fragments into independency or centralizes into bureaucratic tyranny. One of the steps in legitimizing the veto is to revise the Westminster Confession periodically in order to make it conform more closely to the Bible before major challenges to orthodoxy appear. This is mandatory so that a continual process of screening prior to men's ordination and their subsequent exclusion (heresy trials) can take place in terms of a widely agreed-upon and actively agreed-upon profession of faith. When the Confession ceases to be revised as institutional bulwark against attacks on orthodoxy, local courts' confidence in the Presbyterian process of inclusion (ordination) and exclusion (heresy trials) inevitably falters. Candidates for the office of teaching elder will not be thoroughly examined, and heresy trials will cease. It was this problem--the dilemma of frozen Confessional authority in a changing world--that undermined Presbyterian Calvinists after the Swing case in 1874. It was the problem that confronts every system of government:
1. Identifying the final sovereignty
2. Speaking authoritatively in the name of this final sovereignty
3. Specifying the stipulations of this permanent authority
4. Enforcing these stipulations
5. Revising these stipulations to meet the organization's new responsibilities
The Authority of the Presbytery Here is the key jurisdictional point. The presbytery had the authority and therefore the responsibility to impose sanctions: the positive sanction of ordination or the negative sanction of a refusal to ordain. If it failed in its task by ordaining someone whose confession was too deviant, this positively sanctioned individual could later be brought before a higher institutional authority. Furthermore, no one who had been ordained was legally beyond the sanctions of his presbytery. If, after his ordination, he changed his mind about any aspect of the Westminster Confession or the catechisms, and said so publicly, he could be disciplined. The problem was, there was nothing in the Adopting Act that required him to make his new confession public in a presbytery meeting, as he was required to do at the time of his ordination examination. So, a personal strategy of concealment was legally possible. It would take a public confession on his part to warn the presbytery. But where would this confession be more likely to take place? In the pulpit? In a seminary classroom? On the floor of presbytery? Or in a published document?
As it turned out, to become actionable, a Confession-denying confession by an ordained Presbyterian minister almost always had to appear in a published document. The Presbyterians are marked, more than any other denomination in Christendom, by three features: a detailed formal Confession, committees, and printed literature. The Presbyterian system unofficially adopted a rule: "If it isn't in print, it isn't judicable."
The modernists prior to 1900 faced a threat: "publish and perish." The printed word became the primary battlefield of the Presbyterian conflict up until 1893. After Briggs' de-frocking in 1893, the boards and agencies of the Church became the primary battlefields, and not a shot was fired. The conservatives offered no visible resistance. In 1922, the public battlefield again became the printed word, but by this time, the war was over in the bureaucracy. This meant that the visible battle after 1922 would be fought between representatives who had command of the printed word, yet the outcome of the war had already been determined. The war of the words was like fireworks overhead; the battle had been decided in the trenches by 1920.
Double Jeopardy There was another problem, one rarely discussed by the participants or by Church historians: the problem of double jeopardy. The prohibition against a second trial for a man declared innocent is a fundamental principle of the common law. Does this judicial principle apply equally to ecclesiastical law and family law? Are the human rights (immunities from the State) that are protected by common law against double jeopardy more fundamental than the grants of privilege associated with Church membership and ordination or family membership? The churches have remained silent on these questions, but they have all concluded in practice that double jeopardy is legal.
If a presbytery initially clears a man, on what judicial basis can a higher court reverse this decision? Only one way: by ignoring the protection afforded to a civil defendant by the civil judicial rule prohibiting double jeopardy. Protection against double jeopardy is not a universal principle of Christian covenantal jurisprudence--civil, ecclesiastical, and familial. It is exclusively civil. A higher Church court possesses the lawful authority to reverse a presbytery's declaration of "not guilty." This means that the presbytery's trial is without final binding authority. Presbyterianism has rejected protection against double jeopardy. So have all other hierarchical Church traditions.
Even if the synod or General Assembly later de-frocked the entire presbytery--this has never happened--the presbytery's original declaration of "not guilty" would still stand if protection against double jeopardy were a universal judicial principle. The General Assembly actually adopted such a view in 1927.(43) But Presbyterianism does not regard the presbytery as a kind of grand jury: an investigative body that recommends prosecution but does not try cases. The presbytery is a judicial body that declares guilt or innocence, but its declaration is not final.
Nineteenth-century Presbyterian conservatives ignored the civil judicial principle of protection from double jeopardy. Charles Briggs had his presbytery's declaration of innocence reversed by the General Assembly in 1893. This system was immediately challenged by liberal Henry van Dyke. "It is an encouragement of perpetual strife, and a thing unheard of even in criminal courts where they do not make any profession of religion."(44) He ignored the obvious: a presbytery is not just a court; it is also an executive agency. It ordains ministers. If it also possessed final authority in refusing to de-frock them, it would become a judge of its own prior decisions. It would sit in judgment of itself. To this extent, it would become autonomous, destroying the hierarchical authority of Presbyterianism. This is not true of a local civil court, which is not an initiating (executive) agency. No organization can delegate both initiating authority and final appeals authority to its lowest court and still retain its character as a hierarchical organization.
Conflicts over Turf Corporate bodies that are not officially represented by one identifiable individual have great difficulty in initiating anything.(45) This is why local organs in original Presbyterianism must initiate almost everything. Because of the paralyzing effects of the "turf" conflicts and personal rivalries that are inevitable within any corporate structure, a Presbyterian court's primary function is to apply the veto and settle disputes that have been appealed to it. The veto is a negative sanction.
Because of the high costs of gathering information in any large organization, disputes tend to be confined within subdivisions. Most information in life is generated and evaluated locally.(46) Modern communications theory has discovered that the farther away judges are from a project's point of initiation, the more subject they are to institutional "noise."
When every case is appealed to a higher court, the organization faces breakdown. This is what has happened to the civil court system in the United States.(47) To preserve institutional order, disputes must be contained locally. Nowhere can this be seen with greater clarity than in India during Britain's rule after 1860. It was the genius of the British Empire in India that a thousand young men in their twenties could control a huge and diverse population scattered across a huge area. Few of them lived long enough to retire. (The interesting but neglected fact is that by 1860, they were very often sons of poor country parsons.) As Drucker puts it, "These untrained, not very bright, and totally inexperienced youngsters ran districts comparable in size and population to small European countries. And they ran them practically all by themselves with a minimum of direction and supervision from the top."(48) They imposed this control with only a relative handful of troops to enforce their local decisions. They had to do this by persuasion, with only the threat of military sanctions, for there were not sufficient troops to enforce every decision by every administrator. To call in the troops was considered a failure.(49) Similarly, to call in a higher court is considered a failure by almost any bureaucracy. Bureaucracies seek to contain disputes.
Presbyteries Delegated Their Responsibility
The presbyteries had a built-in tendency to ordain every seminary graduate. Why was there nearly automatic ordination, at least regarding theological confession? First, a seminary had sanctioned his academic performance. Who was going to challenge this? Second, if every individual with a complaint against a newly ordained minister had appealed to the next higher court, the Presbyterian system would have broken down. The denomination would never have grown large, because of the high cost of adjudicating endless disputes. The desire for growth mandated an etiquette hostile to appeals by critics in the presbytery. Presbyteries took the seminary's word for a graduate's orthodoxy. Third, a local presbytery wanted as much autonomy as it could maintain. The way to gain this autonomy was to avoid two things: appeals up the chain of command and intervention initiated from above. One way to preserve the illusion of presbyterial autonomy in ordination matters was to transfer responsibility to a legally independent agency that had no control over the presbytery: the seminary. Fourth, the denomination was chronically short of graduates of Presbyterian seminaries. The presbyteries were under pressure to ordain candidates. (Note: a chronic shortage is the product of below-market pricing. The word "shortage" should always be mentally accompanied by the phrase "at the price offered.")
By saying yes to the confession a candidate for the teaching eldership who had been graduated by a seminary, the presbytery transferred the cost of organizing any court appeal to "malcontents." A malcontent was defined institutionally as anyone who disrupted his presbytery. Few elders wanted to be identified as malcontents. So, a modernist who had already been screened by a seminary was safe until he "went denominational" with his beliefs, i.e., until he went into print. Printed documents cross jurisdictional boundaries more readily than any other form of incriminating evidence.(50) This meant that modernists could pick and choose their battlefields and their timing. This transferred the offense into their hands. When they stayed out of print, they could operate safely under the umbrella of their presbyteries or their seminary employers. As an overture from the Nashville Presbytery put it in 1916, in the midst of a major Church dispute over the liberal ordination policies of the New York Presbytery, "it is not only discourteous and unwarranted, but also unchristian and subversive of proper discipline, for one Presbytery to assert that the ministers of another Presbytery or Presbyteries are untrue to their ordination vows."(51) As for the validity of the charges, the New York Presbytery insisted that complaints by other presbyteries had been made "on the basis of misleading newspaper records."(52) Why so much fuss, the presbytery implied, just because three ordained candidates had refused to affirm the virgin birth of Christ?(53)
Does this mean that presbyteries normally seek to cover up theological deviations by those within its jurisdiction? Yes, as surely as they cover up moral deviations.(54) This is another result of every bureaucracy's desire for secrecy. Any public discussion of deviant ideas or deviant behavior within its jurisdiction calls into question the bureaucracy's wisdom in allowing at least one of the disputants into the system. Other bureaucracies may start prying into the operations of the first one. This threatens the first bureaucracy's authority to police itself. It threatens turf.
In the case of a denomination without an objective confession to serve as the institutional standard, one of two things will begin to take place: (1) the central government will become increasingly dependent on local authorities to police the system, which leads to fragmentation ("the confusion of tongues"); or (2) local governments will become increasingly subjected to a central government that is operating arbitrarily from a distance. The Northern Presbyterian Church was headed in the first direction until 1922, when conservatives sounded the alarm in response to a crucial printed document, a sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick. After 1930, it moved in the second direction, when the modernist-inclusivist alliance at the top took steps to isolate and then purge the conservative critics.
With respect to disciplining heresy, it is very expensive for someone in one presbytery to gather incriminating evidence against someone in another presbytery. Critics within a presbytery are unlikely to cooperate openly with critics in another presbytery, even though those outside share their concern. Elders knows this informal rule; to break this rule is a breach of etiquette. Every organization has formal rules and unofficial etiquette, and a breach of etiquette, even in the name of the formal rules, carries unofficial but very real penalties. Those critics who violate it begin their campaign from an institutionally tainted starting point. They face an uphill battle, even if they come in the name of the Church's Confession. Thus, judicial cases that go up the Presbyterian appeals court are rarely theological disputes between an individual or congregation in one presbytery and someone in another. If critics within a presbytery remain silent about abuses, there is little likelihood that critics across presbyterial boundaries will complain to the General Assembly.
In prelacy or episcopacy, a bishop may be willing to confront another bishop, face to face, first in private and then in public, in order to deal with a problem in the other bishop's territory. He sees the problem as a personal threat to his own authority, especially if the problem is theological or institutional, since the problem may spread into his own jurisdiction. He defends his own turf in the name of some higher principle, and the etiquette of the organizational structure allows this. A cross-boundary dispute can easily be initiated by a bishop in the name of some higher principle. This is not the case in Presbyterianism. Because Presbyterianism has no person with the official authority to initiate such a confrontation across jurisdictions, there is little likelihood that a Presbyterian elder will do this with anyone outside his presbytery's boundary except in strictly personal conflicts. A layman will never do it.
First Among Equals I have already referred to this feature of government. We need to consider it in greater detail. The seminary professor becomes a dominant force within Presbyterianism because of Presbyterianism's traditional emphasis on a formally trained ministry. His authority is wholly unofficial, so it is extremely difficult to identify its operations or oppose it judicially. Every ministerial candidate is forced to go through a preliminary screening process: seminary. Thus, the academic screeners inevitably become a dominant force within an organization--the presbytery--that limits itself mostly to screening and vetoing. The presbytery's role in training ministers inevitably declined when the seminary's role increased. Going under care of presbytery became a formality. The seminary's faculty became the primary screeners. They did so in terms of formal academic criteria, not pastoral criteria.
Princeton's B. B. Warfield in 1917 warned against the growing authority of the theological seminary at the expense of presbyterial authority in the training of ministers, but this warning came more than a century too late.(55) But this aspect of Presbyterianism's unofficial pecking order explains why Machen, as the most famous Presbyterian seminary professor, could successfully initiate the counter-attack against the organized forces opposing Calvinism.
There is another aspect of this unofficial hierarchy of influence: teaching elders over ruling elders. Teaching elders are screened by "accredited professionals": first by seminary professors, then by a presbytery's examining committee. Pastors are deferred to as possessors of greater authority by ruling elders, who have been screened only by local church members and the presbytery. The teaching elder becomes unofficially dominant over the ruling elder in the Church's higher courts, even though "one elder-one vote" is the official rule. To offset this influence, ruling elders can conceivably exercise the veto at the presbytery, synod, or General Assembly level, since their votes count as heavily as the votes of teaching elders. But this power is never exercised autonomously by ruling elders as a voting bloc. Both their self-confidence and their experience are low. As for initiating anything against the suggestion of the combined witness of seminary professors and teaching elders, there is little likelihood that ruling elders will attempt it. The price is too high. Their pain is guaranteed, while their likelihood of success is almost zero. So, ruling elders become, at best, the swing vote. This was the situation in the 1923 General Assembly, when the ruling elders voted for the reaffirmation of the 1910 Doctrinal Deliverance. The teaching elders were evenly divided, and the employees of the boards were opposed.
If a seminary drifts into heresy, there is little that can be done about it within a presbytery except to appeal to a higher court and refuse to ordain graduates of the seminary. The presbytery cannot do very much to improve the seminary, which is not under its authority; the presbytery's only response is defensive: exclusion of its graduates. If the seminary is legally independent of the denomination, things become even more difficult for its outside critics. This institutional reality became crucial in the Presbyterian conflict. The Presbytery of New York, dominated by Union Theological Seminary and its graduates, became modernism's primary "point of entry" into the denomination, a kind of theological Ellis Island. Union Seminary was legally independent rather than under the authority of the denomination after it withdrew from the Presbyterian Church in 1892 in response to the General Assembly's veto of Charles Briggs as Union's professor of biblical theology. It had no Church authority over it, yet it remained the primary training institution for candidates for the ministry in New York. After 1900, conservative ruling elders within the New York Presbytery were almost powerless to take action against these graduates once they had been ordained as teaching elders.
The Presbyterian structure makes it very difficult for those outside a presbytery to take action against a man who is being shielded by his own presbytery. Only in the most notorious cases, where the offender had gone into print with his views, could those outside break the "protective coating" of the New York Presbytery's shell. The best analogy that I can think of is biological: the diseased cell. If the body's antibodies cannot isolate the diseased cell and kill it, the "rogue cell" will infect and transform all the others. The New York Presbytery became the biological equivalent of a lentivirus: very slow working but ultimately fatal to its host.
Presbyterian Leadership The leadership of Presbyterianism has included theological scholars, yet the form of government of American Presbyterianism does not even mention the office of scholar. Function very early replaced form. While a ruling elder in theory has equal voting authority with a teaching elder, in fact teaching elders dominate the Presbyterian governmental structure at all levels. While a teaching elder in theory has equal voting authority with a seminary professor, in fact the interests of seminary professors have long dominated those presbyteries in which the seminaries operate. The operational hierarchy of Presbyterianism is this: seminary professors > teaching elders > ruling elders > members. The basis of the professors' authority is Presbyterianism's traditional insistence on an educated ministry, meaning a formally educated and officially certified teaching eldership.
Local church members finance the entire structure. Here is the great paradox of all hierarchical denominations: money flows from the bottom to the top, while power flows from the top to the bottom. Presbyterianism, being Protestant, acknowledges formally that individuals possess final governmental authority--the right to transfer their memberships to other denominations or local congregations--but, governmentally speaking, power flows downward. Members rarely transfer to a rival denomination, and when they do, they usually do so as individuals rather than as members of organized protest groups. Most of those who pay the pipers generally remain content to listen to whatever tunes the pipers choose to play. This was true of the Presbyterianism hierarchy, 1869 to 1936. This is why the semi-independent tune-writers, i.e., seminary professors, always become the functional high priests of Presbyterianism.
Eventually, listeners cease to pay the pipers. The decline in membership of the mainline American denominations has accelerated since the end of World War II,(56) especially after 1970.(57) Old members rarely leave except by death, but replacements rarely arrive except by birth (and then leave during college). Attrition is eroding the domains of the lordly pipers. But this is a long, drawn-out process. Rarely do listeners revolt. They just leave: by death, by letter of transfer, or by just wandering away.
In nineteenth-century Presbyterianism, theologians were usually employed by the seminaries. Orthodox theologians were caught between the traditional academic ideology of academic freedom and the centuries-old reality of infiltration by covenant-breakers: beginning in the institutions of higher learning and spreading through the entire society. They refused to break with the ideology of academic freedom. They placed the supposedly neutral domain of scholarship above the Westminster Confession of Faith--not openly but operationally. They placed the seminaries beyond the negative sanctions of the Church. This doomed orthodox Calvinism within the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., just as it has doomed every other Presbyterian denomination that has not become a separatist ghetto without a college attached to it. The formula for non-separatist Presbyterianism is: Presbyterian Church + Presbyterian college + Presbyterian seminary + time = liberalism. The formula for separatist Presbyterianism is: Presbyterian Church - Presbyterian college + Presbyterian seminary + time = liberalism or pietism. What happened in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., from 1869 to 1936, conforms to the first formula.
Overcoming the Strategy of Subversion The conservatives in both the Old School and the New School adopted a defensive strategy after 1900. First, it was defensive intellectually. It allowed the intellectual leaders of a rival confession to establish the terms of public discourse. It was in this sense reactionary. This was the conservatives' crucial strategic error. In intellectual matters, as in moral matters, a defensive stance leads to surrender on the installment plan. To take anything except the moral and intellectual high ground is to experience a lifetime of making apologies. Apologizing is not what apologetics is all about.
Second, the New School initially possessed the instruments of legitimate judicial authority, but they failed to use these instruments effectively and continuously. In 1900, Presbyterian conservatives had visible control, but they refused to press their advantage in the Church's courts. In 1936, they lost. Those who did not join the tiny exodus became silent onlookers.
The liberals' strategy of subversion could not be defeated by using short-range tactics or through a primarily defensive strategy. It could not be defeated by building thicker walls around the camp, for this produces a ghetto, not an army on the march. A successful defense requires a systematic offense: an assault against the enemy's worldview outside the camp, as well as a systematic policing of the ranks inside the camp. It requires the imposition of negative sanctions: inside and outside. It requires an ideological and financial assault outward--called missions--and constant ideological housecleaning inward. This is a full-time war.
The strategy of subversion is inappropriate for Christianity. We are not to be wolves in sheep's clothing, nor are we to be sheep in wolves' clothing. We must be completely open about our goal: the conquest of the hearts and minds of everyone on earth by the comprehensive gospel of Jesus Christ.(58) This gospel is public. "The high priest then asked Jesus of his disciples, and of his doctrine. Jesus answered him, I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said nothing. Why askest thou me? ask them which heard me, what I have said unto them: behold, they know what I said" (John 18:19-21).
The capture of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., is a classic case of the successful implementation of the two-fold strategy of subversion: offensive and defensive. The shepherds who were on duty did not recognize what was happening to them until it was too late. The conspirators then removed from active duty a few representative shepherds who were willing to resist. The other shepherds meekly conformed for the sake of remaining officially on duty. The pay was good, and the uniforms were impressive: the robes of authority. By 1937, there was only a symbolic role for conservative shepherds. They had been penned in by the wolves.
Conclusion The Scottish-American Presbyterian court system has always officially rested on three assumptions. First, the primary responsibility for initiating a Church lawsuit lies at the local level, either with the congregation (lay members and ruling elders) or the presbytery (teaching elders). Second, the Westminster Confession of Faith and its two catechisms serve as the Constitution of the Church. The Bible is fundamental law, but it must always interpreted in court cases by means of the Constitution. Third, in order to preserve both the theological integrity and the unity of the Church, courts at every level must impose negative sanctions on those elders, especially teaching elders, who refuse to preach and adjudicate in terms the Church's Constitutional-Confessional standards.
The Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., failed to abide by assumptions two and three after 1900. By making it almost impossible for individuals to bring formal charges against a minister from outside a presbytery's boundaries, the traditional Presbyterian court system made it nearly impossible for critics of modernism to dislodge those who gave verbal profession to the Confession once and then repudiated it for the remainder of their careers.
The problem was sanctions, or lack thereof. Once ordained, a man was almost immune to formal negative sanctions unless he made a contentious public display of his disagreement with the Church or its Confession. The decisive issue was contentiousness. The Church's operational sin of sins was contention: disturbing the peace of the Church. The winners in the struggle for control of the Church would be those who worked quietly, not those whose rhetoric was most powerful. But principled men cannot remain silent in the face of opposition to their most cherished beliefs and institutions. The rhetoric would eventually escalate. When it came to rhetoric, Presbyterians were the most confrontational of the main religious traditions in America.(59)
The Northern Presbyterian Church could not contain the contradictory theological forces that waged war for control of the denomination. The result was a series of splits: in 1741, 1838, and 1936.
There is a familiar slogan in America which applies the symbolism of an opera to the affairs of life: "It ain't over until the fat lady sings." The fat lady would sing only when one side or the other gained control over the Church's courts and then systematically began to impose negative sanctions. The crucial issue was sanctions.
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Footnotes:
1. Reprinted in The Presbyterian Enterprise: Sources of American Presbyterian History, edited by Maurice W. Armstrong, Lefferts A. Loetscher, and Charles A. Anderson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), pp. 253-54.
2. Digest of the Acts and Deliverances of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church In the United States of America, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Office of the General Assembly, 1938), I:575.
3. For a discussion of a possible strategy, see the Conclusion to Part 2, above: section on "The Ordination Examination."
4. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 16.
5. Gary North, Backward, Christian Soldiers? (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1984), ch. 7.
6. This strategy of subversion was employed throughout the West. It has worked everywhere, even in religiously and culturally isolated nations such as Portugal.
7. The institutional model is the Jesuit Order. The oath-bound solidarity, discipline, and fixity of purpose that marked the Jesuits from 1534 to 1965 is unmatched by any other organization that I am aware of. Yet even the Jesuits succumbed to the modernists' strategy of subversion. The collapse took place in a two-year period: 1965-1966. See Malachi Martin, The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
It is one of the remarkable facts of Western history that the Jesuits' founder, Ignatius of Loyola, and John Calvin studied at the same time (1528-29) at the same small college at the huge (40,000 students) University of Paris, the College of Montaigu. Erasmus had studied there a generation earlier.
8. Nathaniel Weyl, Karl Marx: Racist (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1979), p. 67.
9. See Chapter 1, above, section on "The Five Points of Modernism."
10. Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London: SCM Press, [1980] 1984), Part II.
11. Presbyterian Review's biggest catch for the modernists was Henry Preserved Smith of Lane Seminary. See Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 34.
12. Pour doctrine into.
13. The University of Bologna, devoted to a revival of Roman law, was the original model for the secularization of Western education. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 123-27.
14. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 14.
15. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, [1983] 1993), p. 11.
16. Russell Kirk, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning: An Episodic History of American University and College Life since 1953 (South Bend, Indiana: Gateway, 1978).
17. Russell Kirk, The Intemperate Professor (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), p. 31.
18. Ibid., p. 37.
19. Russell Kirk, Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition (Chicago: Regnery, 1955), p. 1. I worked with Couch in the summer of 1963. I was not impressed.
20. This is not equally true of covenantal institutions, e.g., the family, but schools are not covenantal institutions, i.e., established by a lawful self-maledictory oath before God.
21. Henry Manne [MANee], "The Political Economy of Modern Universities," in Anne Husted Burleigh, ed., Education in a Free Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1973).
22. Robert A. Nisbet, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945-1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1971); Nisbet, "The Permanent Professors: A Modest Proposal," in Nisbet, Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New York: Random House, 1968), ch. 12.
23. Winston Churchill's phrase regarding what he believed was the military weak point of the Nazis: the Balkans.
24. See Robert L. Breckenridge, "Presbyterian Government: Not a Hierarchy, but a Commonwealth" (1843), in Paradigms in Polity, edited by David W. Hall and Joseph H. Hall (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 507. James Bannerman referred to three systems, "the Episcopalian or Prelatic, the Presbyterian, and the independent systems." Bannerman, The Church of Christ, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, [1869] 1960), II:260. Thomas Witherow criticized prelacy's centralized tyranny (Church of England) and independency's capacity for localized tyranny, but he never referred to episcopacy. Witherow, The Apostolic Church: Which Is It? (Edinburgh: Publication Committee of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, [1856] 1967), pp. 14-15; 59-66. Paradigms in Polity reprints the first section on pages 37-38.
25. Manual for Church Officers and Members, 4th ed. (n.p.: Office of the General Assembly by the Publication Department of the Board of Christian Education, 1930), p. 256.
26. Ibid., p. 288.
27. Ibid., p. 230.
28. If modern Presbyterianism had an accountable representative for each presbytery or regional synod who answered to the regional synod, but who was empowered to act in its name between synod meetings, Presbyterianism would become episcopal. In some Calvinist denominations, there used to be a special office of superintendent, which was similar to a bishop's role in episcopacy. See "Superintendent," Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros, 1894), X:32.
29. It is worth noting that when Bryan ran for Moderator of the General Assembly in 1923, a period of comparative strength for conservatives, he lost.
30. His biographer lists 54 volumes, 25 pamphlets, 64 articles, and 69 published addresses and sermons. James Alan Patterson, Robert E. Speer and the Crisis of the American Protestant Missionary Movement, 1920-1937 (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton theological Seminary, 1980), pp. 197-210.
31. Calvinism in its postmillennial version--the common version in nineteenth-century Presbyterianism--is not inherently exclusivist numerically, since it preaches worldwide evangelism and triumph. But until the days of expansion come, Calvinism is operationally the most exclusivist theology in Christendom. It teaches that God predestines the few to salvation and lets the many perish. It teaches that Christ did not die for all men in an eternal salvation sense; He died only for the elect.
32. Max Weber commented on this feature of bureaucracy as long ago as the World War I era. "This superiority of the professional insider every bureaucracy seeks further to increase through the means of keeping secret its knowledge and intentions. Bureaucratic administration always tends to exclude the public, to hide its knowledge and action from criticism as well as it can. Prussian church authorities now threaten to use disciplinary measures against pastors who make reprimands or other admonitory measures in any way accessible to third parties, charging that in doing so they become `guilty' of facilitating a possible criticism of the church authorities. . . . This tendency toward secrecy is in certain administrative fields a consequence of their objective nature: namely, wherever power interests of the given structure of domination toward the outside are at stake, whether this be the case of economic competitors of a private enterprise or that of potentially hostile foreign polities in the public field." Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster, [c. 1917] 1968), p. 992.
33. Witherow, Apostolic Church, p. 69.
34. Ibid., p. 65.
35. Simmel, "Superordination and Subordination" (1908), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, [1950] 1964), p. 290.
36. Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1944). See Chapter 14, below, section on "Three Management Systems."
37. Cited in Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 115.
38. Witherow believed that these are different departments of the same offices: Apostolic Church, p. 67; cf. p. 75, where he lamented the "disparity among teaching and ruling elders among Presbyterians. . . ."
39. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1904).
40. Digest of the Acts and Deliverances of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church In the United States of America.
41. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 2.
42. "The Adoption Act of 1729," reprinted in Presbyterian Enterprise, p. 31.
43. See Chapter 10, above: subsection on "No More Heresy Trials."
44. Henry van Dyke, The Bible As It Is (New York: Session, 1893), p. 17.
45. The Church is represented in heaven by Jesus Christ. He delegates authority to the institutional Church.
46. F. A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), in Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), ch. 4.
47. Macklin Fleming, The Price of Perfect Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
48. Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 404.
49. Ibid., p. 405.
50. An audio cassette tape crosses boundaries today, but this is a post-1960 phenomenon.
51. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1916, p. 59.
52. Ibid., p. 130.
53. Ibid., p. 131.
54. When a Presbyterian pastor is found to have committed adultery, one approach for his presbytery is to persuade him to resign quietly and take a church into another presbytery. This strategy is called, "Not with our wives, you don't!" Part of my library on Puritan history belonged to a pastor in just this situation. He decided to leave the pastorate instead of moving. He sold his library. With the rise of civil lawsuits against churches and presbyteries, this tendency to cover up has escalated. Public ecclesiastical sanctions can subsequently cost a church millions of dollars in legal fees and judgments. The same conservative presbytery to which the adulterous pastor belonged also had a member who was a suspected homosexual. When the local government's case against him lost in civil court on a technicality, he privately threatened a lawsuit against the presbytery if it brought charges against him. The man taught in a local high school. The presbytery kept him on its rolls. He should have been excommunicated for threatening a civil lawsuit. But no one wants a lawsuit, which is why I'm not naming names. You will have to take my word for all this.
55. Benjamin B. Warfield, "The Purpose of the Seminary," The Presbyterian (Nov. 22, 1917); reprinted in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield--I, edited by John E. Meeter (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1970), p. 374.
56. Dean Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
57. See the citations in Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 3.
58. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).
59. Delwyn G. Nykamp, A Presbyterian Power Struggle: A Critical History of Communication Strategies in the Struggle for Control of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., 1922-1924 (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1974), pp. 53-58.